Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘That doesn’t help us here,’ Toharan said as they reached the corridor.

  ‘No, but they will,’ Gabrille said as the Raptors pushed past them and shot up into the dome, bringing the fight to the Dragon Claws.

  Volos had been expecting them. It had been too much to hope that they had killed the Swords of Epiphany’s only jump pack warriors on Flebis. The Raptors powered through the Claws’ net of bolter fire, their own guns answering and disrupting the rain of death Volos and his brothers were sending down. For a few seconds, the two assault teams traded shots, every warrior moving too fast, jerking through the air too unpredictably, for his foe to target him successfully, and every warrior unable to score a telling hit. Then Dragons and birds of prey did as instincts and necessity commanded and flew at each other to grapple. The upper reaches of the great hall rang with the clash of armour and armour, cry of bird and roar of reptile. Giants smashed at each other as they rocketed beneath the shattered dome.

  A Raptor slammed into Volos. The smaller traitor Space Marine was a swarm of clutching limbs as they tumbled end over end to the observation platform. They hit, but the Raptor didn’t lose his grip. They rolled, clawing at each other’s armour for purchase. They came to a halt with the Raptor on top. He pulled back an arm with a gladius. Volos reached up, shot out a bone-blade and impaled the Raptor beneath the chin. The other end of the blade came out the back of the traitor’s helmet. Volos kicked the corpse away and sprang to meet the next Chaos Space Marine. The Raptors had to be dealt with quickly. He could feel the Claws’ momentum bleeding away.

  The Swords and Disciples held the counter-attack back until the bulk of the Dragons was almost upon them. The defenders had taken hard blows, but now they struck to annihilate. Their one heavy bolter stuttered to life, stitching fist-sized rounds along the front of the Dragon advance. But the main blow came from the psykers. What the traitors lacked in heavy weaponry, they made up for in numbers and in sorcery. The hail of bolter and las had begun to falter as the Dragons charged forward and blasted holes in the line. But the heavy bolter response forced a pause as the attackers evaded the fire or took hits. Melus felt the attack lose steam, and in the moment of hesitation came the energy bolts.

  The sorcerous attack was a full salvo, multiple psykers unleashing their powers simultaneously. A flash that giggled side-swiped Melus, knocking him down. His left shoulder guard had vanished. The edges sizzled, and his upper arm was opened almost to the bone. Two other brothers weren’t as lucky. Their helmets and heads were gone. Tendrils like coiling snakes danced over the stumps.

  ‘Kill them!’ Melus roared. There was no need to specify the targets. Already, his armour’s auto-senses were feeding him the smell of ozone and hothouse flowers as the magic built up again. Too many brothers were on their knees, shaking off the assault, but slowed down for a moment. He knew that was all it would take for disaster if they lost the race to the next blow.

  They lost. The sorcery came again, much too soon. The attacks had been staggered, and this one arrived with its targets slowed and primed for destruction. Melus howled his fury as he saw what came for them. It was an immense Space Marine made of fire, and it was the work of a psyker who had been a brother.

  Charged up and running, the Gemini grinder was a thing of the warp. It travelled the immaterium with the ease and speed of a hawk through air. There were no obstacles in its path, and storms only sped it to its destination. The machine had known its target before its jump, and now it shot out of the warp, bringing doom to the Camargus system. Aighe Mortis lay ahead, and the power of two billion dead moved grinder and moon forward to an even greater feast.

  Ennyn was overmatched. The Lexicanium was the Black Dragons’ sole remaining psyker. He could have taken on any one of the enemy’s sorcerers in single combat, but now he was faced with a virtual phalanx of them. He didn’t have the power.

  But perhaps he had the rage.

  The fire being that was falling upon him and his brothers was a blasphemy beyond anything he had ever seen or imagined. It was an avenger, and its reality was created by drawing upon the lore and tradition of the Chapter itself. It was a manifestation of the collective identity of the Black Dragons, and he would not permit it to be turned against the very warriors of which it was a part. He saw Jemiah a few metres back from the front lines of the traitors. Ennyn’s anger, purified by his absolute faith in the truths of his Chapter, lashed out at the faithless Space Marine. Ennyn felt his entire being consumed in an expression of holy anger, and as he expended everything he had in this single strike, his mind erupted with new potential.

  Jemiah clapped his hands to his head. His scream was a brutish gargle, high pitched and cut short. It was shoved back down his throat. He fell to his knees, then on his face. His psychic hood flickered and smoked. His monstrous avatar did not dissipate. It had its arm raised to strike the Dragons, its four-metre sword about to cull them with fire. Then, as if the death of its treacherous creator restored its true identity, it turned around, and brought the sword down, setting traitors ablaze.

  Snarling, the Black Dragons reclaimed the initiative.

  The Raptors fought with the assurance of the angels they thought they were. The Dragon Claws hit back with the savagery of what Volos knew they must become. They were dragons in every sense. They burned their foe and stripped the flesh from his bones. They met the Raptors, and what chance did mere birds have against the monsters of myth? None, the Claws proved. The Raptors fell. Volos landed on the back of one and brought him to the ground. The impact of Space Marines would have cratered a marble floor, but the temple stones gave nothing. Volos heard the Sword’s bones shatter.

  He stood from his fallen foe and saw Toharan’s forces rush from the cover of the entrance hall. They came out firing, but there was a raggedness to their emergence, as if they were being forced to stage their counter-charge before they were ready. He decided to give them more cause for uncertainty. He used a blade to punch a hole in the Raptor’s armour just below the neck. He slipped a frag grenade from his belt, shoved it into the opening, heaved the traitor over his head and threw him at the enemy. The Raptor exploded in mid-air, showering ignited promethium over the attackers. They stumbled just long enough for him to fell three of them with his bolter.

  The other Dragon Claws landed at his side. They joined their fire to his, and they drove more of the traitors back. At the other end of the entrance hall, Volos saw smoke and uproar. For a moment, a wall of flame appeared to be a walking figure. Then it breathed fire forward. He grinned as the dragon flame pursued the faithless on two fronts.

  Toharan launched himself through the fire. His defaced armour was scorched, and Volos thought he could see runes in the burns, Toharan’s new masters branding him as their property. Symael and a Sword were at his side. They threw themselves forward and down, beneath the Claws’ bolt stream and retaliating with their own as they slid across the smooth floor. Volos fired off a burst with his jump pack, taking a high leap to avoid having his legs shot out from under him. He came back down straight at Toharan.

  The Black Dragons’ push from the rear drove the traitor alliance into the great hall. Volos’s brothers followed their foes inside. They were a juggernaut of vengeance, ramming forward with no thought to injury or death. The war lost all trace of coherence. There were no lines anymore. There was only the confusion of melee. Armour slammed into armour. Point-blank bolter fire was answered with dismembering chainsword. Giant predators tore at each other with weapon and fist, fire and bone.

  Nithigg jumped away from Symael’s power fist. The gauntlet passed close enough for its crackling aura to make Nithigg’s eye lenses flare with static. Symael overbalanced and punched the ground. The invulnerable stone resisted the blow, and sent the force jarring up the warrior’s frame. Nithigg stitched Symael’s frame with bolts, blasting open his armour from ribs to helm. As Symael collapsed, blood and organs oozing from the hole in his side, he frowned at Nithigg. He looked more confused tha
n in pain.

  A streak of pity rushed through Nithigg’s anger. The awful waste and tragedy of what had happened was a lead weight in his chest. His hearts ached at what had become of his company. In his centuries of service, he had never seen such division and betrayal. And he had always liked Symael, thought him a first-rate, if unimaginative, fighter. He had trained the younger man. The pain of killing him was as real as the need to do so. He knew Symael and the others had been tempted and manipulated, but they had still made the choices. Yet he couldn’t help but hope for the possibility of at least a hint of redemption. There was so little hope to go around; he couldn’t bring himself to throw away what little he could grasp.

  He moved quickly. He knelt beside Symael. ‘Do you repent your heresy?’ he asked.

  The resentment in Symael’s eyes gave him his answer. He sighed and shot Symael once in the head. Feeling even older, he turned back to the needed job of killing his former brothers.

  Toharan barely twisted out of the way of Volos’s strike. Volos landed within a metre of him and lashed out with his arm-blades. His fury wouldn’t be satisfied with a bolt between Toharan’s eyes. He needed the betrayer’s blood coating his armour. Toharan parried with his chainsword. Its motor whined as its teeth ground against Volos’s adamantine bone. Volos brought his left arm around the hilt, aiming at Toharan’s throat. Toharan jerked his head back and sidestepped, but the blow shattered the side of his helmet. Shaking his head to free it of the broken ceramite, he spun around and brought the chainsword down two-handed. There was the strength and speed in his strike to slice a cannon in half, but Volos moved inside his reach. He smashed his right fist and blade against Toharan’s elbow. He heard armour and bone break. With his left hand, he grabbed Toharan’s gorget and hurled him to the ground.

  They were no longer in the practice cage. Volos wasn’t holding back. No mercy, no quarter, no respite until he had killed the filth at his feet. He raised both fists, prepared to plunge the blades into Toharan’s neck.

  A flicker of movement caught his eye. He glanced up, and saw Aighe Mortis on the eye-screen. The planet was in magnification, but it was also moving closer. The simple truth hit him: Nessun had to be stopped, and there was no time for anything else.

  Volos plunged his arms down to impale Toharan’s throat and be done, his legs already tensing for the leap that would take him to the ossified cardinal. His shift in attention had lasted less than a second, but Toharan was already bringing up his chainsword to block. Something hit Volos from behind, knocking him over Toharan’s head. He landed in a crouch and spun around. He stared into the barrel of a meltagun. Beyond it, the Sword of Epiphany stood in the tainted majesty of gold. Gabrille’s finger squeezed the trigger.

  The shot went wild as Nithigg threw himself against the Sword. He took Gabrille down and rabbit-punched his head until the helm split open. Nithigg’s forearm blade punctured the traitor’s forehead. Gabrille spasmed, limbs rattling against the ground. Something bitter and petty wailed as its host died, and with a writhing flicker, vanished back into the warp.

  Toharan was on his feet and raising his sword again. Nithigg and Volos exchanged quick nods. Nithigg was closer to Toharan and turned to fight him. Volos rose and rode his jump pack on a horizontal flight into the cardinal. It was like colliding with a pillar. Volos grunted and fell against the enormous backbone that Nessun was caressing. Volos felt eldritch energies leach through his armour and into his core. The cardinal grunted mild annoyance, barely aware Volos was there, and batted him aside. Volos recovered his balance and looked at the eye-screen. The grinder was slightly off-centre in its approach to Aighe Mortis. The cardinal’s grey skeleton fingers danced, and the course was corrected.

  As Volos reached for Nessun again, the character of the war shifted as it acquired a focus. The traitors saw him attacking their leader and father, and he became their target. The Dragons blocked them. The butchering frenzy intensified. Volos turned his gun on Nessun and the instrument he played. The bolts ricocheted, almost taking his own head off. The cardinal paid no attention. The details of Aighe Mortis became clearer, and Volos prayed to the Emperor that the screen was still at a high level of magnification. He was about to grab a krak grenade when it finally registered that for all the flame, missiles and weapon fire that had filled the hall, he couldn’t see a pockmark or mar on the surface of the device. Nessun, or the thing that had once been him, transformed now beyond any memory of the human other than a silhouette, was made of the same impervious bone.

  Volos spat at the cardinal’s invulnerability. Seized by inspiration, he raised his bone-blades high. He struck with all his strength and rage. He was the dragon of the Emperor, and he blessed the curse. The blades, touched by Chaos but wielded by faith, hit Nessun’s right forearm. Altered bone met altered bone. The touch of the warp moved over both, but the eye of the Emperor lay on only one.

  Nessun’s arm shattered like porcelain. He screamed, and so did the symbiosis between himself and the instrument. The music that had been thrumming at the base of Volos’s spine since he’d entered the temple fell into a discordant shriek. Nessun turned. His left arm was still attached to the instrument, still clutching and stroking vertebrae, but now with a jerking, spastic, agonised motion. The images on the eye-screen fragmented. There was a last flash of Aighe Mortis veering off to the side, and then a kaleidoscope of impressions of the hall before there was nothing but pain given electric expression. The stump of Nessun’s right arm lifted in supplication, and from it spewed a twisting sinew of energy. It was rope and tentacle and light. It was Chaos channelled through the cardinal. It hit the observation deck, and the walls of the dome. Stone writhed, then collapsed. Massive, agonised slabs fell to crush the combatants.

  The fighting did not stop, but as the realisation of what had transpired rippled through the temple, there was a change in morale so pronounced its effect was almost the same as a hesitation. The Swords of Epiphany were losing their leader and creator. The Disciples weren’t hit as grievously, but Volos was sure they were seeing the pointlessness of their struggle.

  Toharan didn’t. He stormed towards Volos, shaking off Nithigg and blasting through the other fighters like they were wheat. He had lost his helmet in the fight with the old veteran, and his face was contorted by a terrible desperation. Howling an inarticulate denial, he was the embodiment of fanaticism. There was nothing left of the noble Space Marine whom Volos had fought beside for decades. He saw only entitlement, pride and self-loathing transformed into a daemonic hate. Volos raised his bolter to gun down the rabid dog.

  Behind him, Nessun’s scream stopped for a moment, and there was the sound of a laugh. His final act one of revenge and merciless generosity, Nessun lowered his stump and hit Toharan full in the chest with the twitching strands of Chaos energy. Toharan stopped dead and sank to his knees. The energy poured into him.

  Cursing his stupidity, Volos turned on Nessun and smashed his left arm. The instant there was no more connection between the cardinal and the instrument, the energy vanished. Nessun stood and rocked back and forth on his feet. The quality of the grey exoskeleton changed. It became more rigid, darker, brittle. His eyes dimmed as they receded into the bone prison, but they looked up at Volos with an air of bitter exasperation. Volos brought an elbow down on Nessun’s head, and shattered the skull into hundreds of pieces. The scream returned, echoing out of the ether now, and the stump of Nessun’s head spouted a fountain of shrieking warp spirits. They shot up like a geyser and did not come back down. The eye-screen went blank, becoming vacant bone once again.

  Volos turned back to Toharan, half-expecting him to be dead. He was sure his former captain was incapacitated.

  He wasn’t.

  Toharan’s destiny knocked him down and filled him. He had thought the control and command of the Gemini grinder was that destiny, but he had been proven wrong, and now he was experiencing his full flowering. He wondered what it would be as the energy flooded his system. He was about to expe
rience the fulfilment of every potential. He opened his mouth to laugh in triumph.

  The change took him. It was not what he had imagined. His body expanded. Legs, torso and arms lengthened and thickened. He screamed as his nerve clusters were scraped raw by racing bone. Flesh and muscle metastasised. He grew too big for his armour. The plates pressed into his body. They crushed organs. They snapped bones. But still he grew, and even Adeptus Astartes power armour couldn’t contain what he was becoming. It split, and then fell off like a shed skin. He continued to grow. Now his screams weren’t of pain but of disgust. The ugly, stupid, excess of being was consuming him. His dreams of purity were swallowed by rampaging flesh. His mind couldn’t cope. Walls of bodily existence constricted it. He was a monster worse than everything he had despised in his brother Dragons. His last act of sentience was to give voice to his despair. Then he was nothing but anger. He lashed out at the source of his pain, and the source was all existence. The only relief would come if he could smash the universe out of existence and out of his misery with his bare hands. And so he began.

  The creature that had been Toharan was twice Volos’s height and he was still growing. He was a monster of corded flesh and sinew. His face and head were huge caricatures of Toharan’s features. The noble profile was gone, replaced by grotesque growths of spreading bone that passed for a nose and chin. Toharan’s roar wasn’t mindless, but it was utterly mad. He lashed out with fists larger than power hammers. He made no distinction between friend and foe. He grabbed the nearest warrior, a Sword, and smashed him to the ground. Toharan pounded him until he was a swamp of blood and bone fragments. The Black Dragons trained their fire on the monster, but the Swords and Disciples did not. He was dangerous, but he was still of their number, and he was powerful. They continued to fight, forcing the Dragons to deal with them. The war raged in fractal clusters around the monster, while he shrieked and murdered at random.